Meta, Google, Y Combinator leaders call out Trump administration over Alex Pretti’s death — ‘Only a matter of time’

The tech community in the United States is speaking out against the Donald Trump administration after federal agents carrying out the President’s orders shot down a man in Minneapolis on Saturday.

Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old ICU nurse, was fatally shot Saturday by agents who were in the city as part of US President Donald Trump’s crackdown on illegal immigration.

This marked the third shooting in the city by a federal agent this month, and the second where a person died, raising alarms across the world.

Tech leaders call out ICE agents’ actions

The death of Alex Pretti seemed to be the final straw in the Trump administration’s deportation policy for immigrants.

Pretti, who worked at the Veterans Administration hospital in Minneapolis, was shot after ICE agents were seen scuffling with him on an icy roadway in the Midwestern city.

This came less than three weeks after an immigration officer fired on Renee Good, also 37, killing her in her car.

While some people in the tech industry welcomed the administration’s immigration crackdown policy initially, it faced backlash after the killings.

John O’Farrell, general partner at venture capital firm a16z, wrote on X, “Wondering how the eager tech enablers of this regime, including some of my former VC friends and partners, are rationalising this atrocity. Just the latest in a year of horrors. Is all the crypto and AI money in the world really worth this?”

Meta’s chief AI scientist, Yann LeCun, just posted “Murderers”, sharing the video of the shooting.

Y Combinator founder Paul Graham posted, “If someone had predicted before the last election that if Trump won, federal officers would be shooting Americans in the streets, he’d have been dismissed as an alarmist.”

Google Labs director of product Kath Korevec expressed her shock and pain in a post.

In a follow-up post, she sounded a warning: “I can’t go to Minneapolis. And it’s only a matter of time before they show up in force here in the Bay Area.”

“Kristi Noem said ICE is funded through the Big Beautiful Bill and because that money comes from a separate financial bucket, ICE does not have to operate within the constraints of constitutional law. Read that again,” she said in another post.

Jeff Dean, chief scientist at Google DeepMind and Google Research, called the incident ‘shameful’.

“This is absolutely shameful. Agents of a federal agency unnecessarily escalating, and then executing a defenseless citizen whose offense appears to be using his cell phone camera. Every person regardless of political affiliation should be denouncing this.”

Trump administration officials quickly claimed that Pretti had intended to harm the federal agents – as it did after Renee Good’s death – pointing to a pistol it said was discovered on him.

However, video shared widely on social media and verified by US media showed Pretti never drawing a weapon, with agents firing around 10 shots at him seconds after he was sprayed in the face with chemical irritant and thrown to the ground, according to AFP.